


On the House

by h00ligan



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25636285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h00ligan/pseuds/h00ligan
Summary: Sissy has a sweet southern drawl, the kind that sounds like tea saturated with sugar on a hot summer's day.Vanya doesn't mind getting upsold from a couple flowers to several plants. Anything to make Klaus better... right?
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, Sissy Cooper/Vanya Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves/Sissy
Comments: 18
Kudos: 208





	1. Prologue

Klaus hated how fall came early this year. He hated how wet everything got, soaking through his coat and into his bones, where no high or amount of liquor could even come close to warming him. Diego could help, would help. After all, he said only call for emergencies, and this was an emergency. The rain would start freezing him any minute now, as wind whipped around him and his damp coat clung tighter around him. 

Struggling, Klaus stood himself up on bare feet, wrapping that useless damn coat tighter around himself. Dark was coming early, and Diego was on the other side of town, he'd be lucky if he got there before he got sick and put into the hospital for hypothermia again, though he could practically already feel it coming on, the pain in his toes slowly turning to numbness.

"Why don't you just go to the hospital?" came a peeved voice from behind Klaus.

"Well, do I have 'go to the hospital' money?" Klaus replied, in an imitation of the dozens of mothers he'd seen repeat that line to their small children who wanted something from the grocery store. "Just gotta... get to Diego... his place is hot, what with that boiler and all."

"Are you forgetting about Diego? Mr. "I don't want to see your high ass again"? Diego, "I will pin your ass to the wall if I see you in my gym again" Hargreeves?"

"Come on, that was just him not being able to take some light theft, and it was _months_ ago!" Klaus chuckled to the thin air, ignoring whatever strange looks he got. He was used to them by now. He should be, with how much of his spare time was spent getting _nagged_ by his ass of a brother.

"No, Klaus, that was last week. And you didn't steal _his_ shit, remember?"

"The lady cop," Klaus grumbled, leaning against a brick wall. "I was wondering when Diego started keeping his cash in a purse. I was planning on congratulating him on _coming out_ , too."

"What time is it?" Ben asked, looking ahead at a bookstore.

"I don't know, looks like five."

"Come on, she's finishing soon." Ben tried to push Klaus, but fell through him, like always. "Hurry up! Do you want to live or not?"

"You know, when you p-put it th-that way," Klaus mumbles, but pushes forward on wet cement sucking all feeling out of his feet until he stumbles in the bookstore.

"In the end, after our brother Ben died--" Oh, shit. Klaus knew that line. About "Wanting to be loved by a man incapable of giving love."

"You _bastard_ ," Klaus grumbled, taking a seat, though the bookstore wasn't exactly _warm,_ as evidenced by Vanya and her few listeners wearing coats to ward off the cold.

"Yeah, a bastard for wanting to save your stupid life."

Vanya looked up at the obviously familiar voice, and closed the book. "I'm sorry, we have to wrap things up a little early tonight," she said, in that familiar, almost hollow tone she always had. Jesus, he hadn't seen her in what feels like forever, and she'd barely changed. What made it worse, was in some ways, he thought she got a satisfaction out of that book, out of outing Klaus to the world, even if she never said he liked men in so many words. He spent months _trying_ to hate Vanya, but now, shivering and going in and out of consciousness, he could only see the fear in her eyes. "Do one of you have a car?"


	2. Chapter 2

The drive to the hospital was the scariest ten minutes of Vanya’s life. She held Klaus—how did he get so cold—as he swam in and out of consciousness, deliriously talking to who she could only assume is Ben. Where was Ben? Did he miss her? Was Ben just one of Klaus’ delusions or was he really still there, really following them into their adulthood, as a kind of guardian angel? There had to be someone looking out for Klaus, that he stumbled into her reading, at least.

“Of all the people, you bring me to Vanny,” Klaus mutters to thin air in the back of the car. It was the first time she’d seen him since she published the book. He must’ve known about what she said about him, didn’t he? Fuck, she regretted saying all those things about him. She regretted calling him cruel and masochistic as a teenager in her book, regretted telling all the stories of his nonconformity to the world, it was always something secret and safe in the walls of Allison’s room.

If she didn’t write about him so cruelly, would he have even been in this kind of state?

Vanya took Klaus’ icy hands in her own, breathing hot air onto them. She was far from educated on keeping someone with hypothermia alive, but he needed to have some kind of warmth, and that coat was almost frozen to his body—had he always been so _skinny_? Sure, Klaus had always been the slightest member of the Academy, even moreso than Ben, but his drug problem must’ve gotten so much worse since leaving.

“I’m so sorry,” Vanya practically chanted, between “Stay with me”s. “I shouldn’t have written that about you, but please, please stay with me.” Everything got loud, the same way things always did when she got stressed and needed her meds. Her heartbeat, the engine, Klaus’ shaking breath as he finally, _finally_ began to hold onto her the same way she was holding him tight.

“I’m gonna kill Ben again,” Klaus muttered as Vanya rocked him in the cramped space. They were so close to the hospital now.

“No, don’t talk, okay? Save your breath. We don’t know if you have something worse.” She brushed a curl out of Klaus’ face, he was burning up. She needed her meds, but not in front of Klaus, that would only make things worse.

As the pulled up to the hospital, Klaus couldn’t walk anymore, not even stand, so he was put on a gurney and rolled into a hospital room.

“Name?” The woman at the counter asked as she watched her brother get rolled away, she didn’t know where.

“F-Four Hargreeves,” Vanya stuttered over her words, unwilling to make eye contact with her, eyes still in the hall where her brother had disappeared from. The hospital was cold, sterile smelled like bleach. Nothing like the infirmary where they would get broken bones fixed by Grace as kids.

“Relation?”

“My brother.”

“What brought him in here?”

“He’s homeless, I think. Last I checked he was living with my other brother, but—” she finally looked at her. The name read _Lily_ , she seemed to be roughly their age, if not a few years younger. “He showed up to the bookstore where I was doing a reading, half conscious, talking to thin air. I think he has hypothermia. Maybe pneumonia.”

“Name, so we can get in touch with you?”

“Vanya Hargreeves.”

“The author?” A look of surprise crossed her face. “Is that the Séance?”

“I mean, yeah.”

“I had no idea all that shit was going on right under our noses when we looked up to them as kids,” she sighed. “He’s been in before, but usually we just take him back to rehab after recovering from an overdose, he never stays long.”

“Let’s hope it’s the same this time.”

Lily shook her head. “You’re lucky you brought him when we did. We don’t know when he’ll wake up. I’d recommend flowers from across the street, if you’re going to get them.”

* * *

_Sissy’s Flowers_ was a hole in the wall at the plaza across from the hospital. Immediately, she was taken in by the warmth she hadn’t felt since late summer nearly a month ago, everything lit with a mix of blue and red LED lights, granting a dreamlike look to the place, because the sun was deep behind the clouds with the rain. Klaus was safe, finally, so she was able to breathe. Breathe, take a pill, wait for a moment for the world to become quiet again.

There were more than flowers there, there were garden plants already started and herbs and potted succulents in a corner with bright, neutral white LED lights, set directly by the window. There was a comfort to this place, like when Klaus would bring Vanya up the stairs to his greenhouse when she’d have a panic attack, if only that place was a touch smaller, a bit more cramped full of plants and greenery until it was bursting.

“Can I help you?” Asked a voice from behind the counter. It was a thick, sweet southern drawl, not what she’d expect in the cold of the upper Midwest, and it gave her nostalgia for something she never experienced, cold sweet tea on a hot summer’s day as a child, immediately enchanting her to turn around.

“Sissy” was a woman in her mid-thirties, blond, absolutely _gorgeous_ , with a green apron and a pair of latex gardening gloves she hadn’t bothered to take off when she came from the stockroom in the back. For a second, Vanya forgot to talk, she just _stared_ , mouth agape. “Uh, my brother. Hospital. He likes flowers.” Wow. Way to be descriptive. “Daisies?” She suggested, weakly.

“We have some get well bouquets on the right. Can I ask what happened?”

“He’s between places, got caught up in that rain,” Vanya explained, looking over the bouquets, trying to find which one best said “Klaus”. Eventually, she settled on a bouquet of carnations, in a variety of different colors. Klaus liked anything bright and eye catching, even if it wasn’t typical to give someone in a hospital.

As Vanya paid for the bouquet, Sissy’s hand lingered giving her change, and she felt her cheeks warm up inexplicably.

“Come again, you hear?” Sissy said, in that wonderful, honeyed accent, and she nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”


	3. Chapter 3

Klaus woke up with a groan, sunlight beaming in through a window. Window? Diego’s place didn’t have a window situated like this. The boiler room wasn’t this sterile, either, and then he remembered. _Shit_. Ben decided to turn traitor and bring him in to one of Vanya’s readings of that goddamned book that had landed him in court-mandated rehab. Oh, yeah, great move, Vanya, telling everyone about trauma that _wasn’t hers_ to talk about in the first place. And who was she to talk about his behaviors, when Vanya was the same kind of clothes thief, except with Ben? The whole thing infuriated Klaus. Perhaps not to the same homicidal rage that it had triggered in Diego, but Klaus was perfectly happy not seeing his younger sister again in their lifetime.

Which was what made things hard when she was crying over him, begging him to forgive her for the book, begging for him to hold on, as though he hadn’t experienced a cold night on the street before, without her caring, though in truth, she probably didn’t even know. He hadn’t seen Vanya since… well, since Christmas when they were 17 years old. Vanya went back to music school, preparing to go to Juilliard, and Klaus had run away that spring with Diego.

“Looks like Sleeping Beauty is finally up,” Ben said, sitting in the visitor’s chair with his usual book, though he could tell he’d been watching Klaus closely for a while. Were those… flowers in the windowsill? Hot pink and bright red carnations. Klaus was going to ask, but only coughs came out, and a soreness in his chest that he hadn’t experienced the last few times he passed out on the street.

He managed to whisper out, “traitor” among burning lungs and struggling to breathe.

“Oh, I’m the traitor here? Because I wanted to save your ass from dying in the street again? This isn’t some _trick_ for you to keep pulling out, how many times you can OD or freeze in the street just to wake up, okay? Do you think Diego would know that you died in an alley somewhere? Contrary to what you might believe, he isn’t always going to be there for you. One of these days, he’ll be _done_.”

“But Van—” Klaus erupted into another fit of coughs. Okay. Maybe he wasn’t as resilient as he thought this time.

“Left you flowers. And I’m mad at her, too, for what she wrote about us. Okay? But that doesn’t mean we stop being family.”

Apparently, either the talking to air or the coughing fits (to be honest, probably the latter) brought the attention of the doctors, and a nurse came to check on him immediately. He was all curly, sandy blond hair and concerned eyes, listening in on his chest without so much as a word of greeting, and Klaus, curse his somehow still-beating heart, couldn’t stop _staring_ as he called a doctor in. Klaus didn’t want to stop being held by those strong hands, but he heard the word “pneumonia”, and he knew things weren’t good as he was given something to swallow and the doctor and nurse left the room to have a discussion.

He caught the nurse’s nametag, though. It said _Dave_.

* * *

Vanya had returned to the hospital after practice had ended, only to be taken aside by a nurse. His nametag said he was “Dave”, a man in his mid-twenties with kind eyes and a concerned look on his face.

“Ma’am, you brought Mr. Hargreeves in last night, right?”

“Yeah, I’m his sister.”

“I’m afraid that we think, the doctor and I, he has pneumonia. Now, the good news is that you brought him in early, so we think he’ll be relatively easy to treat and he’ll be okay in the long run, but if you hadn’t brought him in—”

Dave didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew what it would end with. Another funeral, four umbrellas around a coffin as they lose another brother too soon. Klaus’ frail, sickly body placed in it and buried in the graveyard he was so mortified of, because God only knew that Dad wouldn’t respect Klaus’ only posthumous wish, to have his ashes scattered like he’d asked since they were children.

“He’ll pull through, though, right?”

“Thanks to you, he will. Uh, can I ask what his name is? I don’t like calling someone _Four_ , you know? Or Séance. And I don’t think he’d like being called that, either.”

“Klaus. His name is Klaus.” She looked over at Klaus, somehow paler than when Vanya had brought him in, turning over to cough in his bed.

“You can talk to him, but make sure he doesn’t say too much. Okay? He needs the air he can get on his own before we have to put him on a respirator.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he’s fine. It’s what siblings do.”

Vanya entered the room, opting to fuss with the flowers with a bit, finding just the right spot for them to still get some warmth whiled getting sun, and smiled at Klaus. “Hey,” she started, voice lost from being out in the cold from her walk to the hospital from the Icarus. She set the coat in the seat beside Klaus and sat down, only to have Klaus glare at her for a moment and he rolled over to lay on his back.

“I know you’re mad at me, and we haven’t had the opportunity to talk about the book since it was published, and—”

She was cut off by a single, raspy word. “No.”

He rolled over in his bed, back facing Vanya and pulling the sheets up closer around himself, the way he’d always done after he and Vanya ended up in a fight over holiday break.

“Okay, I get it, you’re mad at me, but my therapist said that I had to process it all somehow, and someone sent the manuscript to—forget it.” She picked up her bag and put on her coat. She needed some more flowers as a peace offering, and it wouldn’t hurt to see the shopkeeper again.


End file.
